For nine weeks last school year, I was practically every teacher's dream parent. It wasn't that I sent perfectly-prepared, perfectly-behaved children to school every day. Nor did it have anything to do with whether I actually spent time online reviewing the daily lesson plans and assignment grades teachers are required to post regularly for us parents.

But at the end of last school year, I got to step into a teacher's shoes as a long-term substitute, responsible for the same group of seventh-grade English students day to day. I had been substitute teaching at a few middle and junior high schools in St. Tammany Parish all year, but this opportunity seemed perfect.

I figured it would give me a chance to walk in a real teacher's shoes and spend enough time in her world, albeit briefly, to get a feel for what it is like educating today's generation of students, which includes many of your little darlings and three of my own.

The experience was life-altering.

As a girl growing up in Bogalusa in the late 1960s and early '70s, I used to play school with my baby dolls. I'd line my twin bed with pretend students: Barbie and her many knockoff cousins, Baby Tender Love, Dancerina (even after she'd lost an arm in a tussle with my younger sister), and every stuffed animal I'd ever brought home from the Washington Parish fair. Then I'd prance, pencil in hand, back and forth, teaching my captive crew how to say their ABCs, count, and spell.

When I grew out of dolls, my younger sister and cousins became my students. I always wanted to be the teacher, even the few times when I was ordered by an adult to play nicely and give someone else a turn.

But I grew up, and life pointed me in a different direction, toward journalism and ultimately to the nation's capital, where my husband, Kevin, and I spent 17 years, pursuing demanding careers. When we were blessed with three children back-to-back 13 years ago, we began the exhausting juggle of working while raising little ones. Plus, we were doing so in an expansive metropolitan area without the support of our families. Thus, the pull of home was always strong.

Then God, it seemed, dropped Kevin and me a big gift. At the same time that Kevin was considering retirement, my employer offered enticing, newsroom-wide buyout packages in an effort to downsize. With little hesitation, we jumped at the opportunities, packed our bags and headed home in late July 2012. We settled in Slidell.

As I began digging within to discover what I wanted to do next, there it was: that old flame for teaching, still flickering.

I wanted to give back to young, impressionable students some of what I'd gotten from so many teachers early in my journey: Mary Paduda, who had fourth-graders reading novels, instead of using textbooks exclusively, long before that was popular; Mary Campbell, who made grammar as exciting as art with intricate sentence diagrams that gave each word its proper place; Loreane Hall (now Loreane Luter), who taught my fingers to zoom across a typewriter; Barbara Butler, who instructed me on the fine art of singing and performing, and along with Ada Hannibal (now Ada Green), shared with me many lessons about life.

And so, I set out on my new path and even signed up to take the additional online college courses and state-required tests to earn full certification. But I discovered pretty quickly that the classroom of my fantasies looked nothing like real life.

I'd taught college, where the age and maturity of the students made a huge difference. The thought of spending thousands of dollars of their parents' hard-earned income on tuition and the prospects of a future suddenly not so far away helped to keep a certain amount of decorum in the classroom. That usually allowed me to focus on the subject matter at hand.

Before last year, though, the closest I'd come to teaching kids, other than my own, was my childhood bedroom. There, of course, Barbie and Dancerina were never rude or disruptive. They were incapable of rolling their eyes, sleeping in class, talking incessantly, or worse.

But in a generation that has grown up on the Internet, reality television, social media, and mobile devices that make it all easily accessible, much of the disrespectful behavior and language prevalent there often spills into the classroom. And woe to the teacher who doesn't figure out instantly how to make adjectives, verbs, and stories read from old-fashioned paperbacks register somehow on the students' fun meter.

I struggled with the most basic step to teaching: connecting with the students and maintaining order. Many days, despite my best efforts and deep desire to touch lives, I yelled too much to tuned-out ears, lectured too often to blank stares, and left my classroom in tears, feeling like a failure.

Yet, I marveled at the many professionals around me who did their jobs well: the much-loved science teacher whose child-like humor won the students over before they realized how much he was actually teaching them; the well-dressed English teachers who had restless seventh-graders strolling before their peers, like little lawyers, doing presentations, called Socratic seminars; the social studies teacher-coach whose booming voice and likeable personality made a history lesson seem less like one; the cheerful administrator, always surrounded by kids.

I saw teachers, who regularly spent their Saturday mornings in their classrooms, preparing lessons for the upcoming week; teachers who, despite feeling exhausted and burnt out by the year's end, genuinely loved kids, loved their jobs, loved their school; educators who approach what they do like a calling.

I did an honest assessment. The teacher I'd imagined I'd be didn't match who I was. I have too much flight in my spirit to stay in the same room all day, every day. I have too little patience, and a bladder that refused to work at scripted times. Besides, my students were supposed to love me, and they didn't. I was supposed to love teaching them, and I didn't.

Just as I was beginning to ask myself, "Well, now what?" this north shore community news job came to my attention. And here I am. Even as the news business bends and stretches in ways that are unfamiliar to me, I am happy in more ways than one to be back home, back where I belong.

Lisa Frazier Page is the North Shore Community News Editor and Managing Producer for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. She can be reached at 985-645-2857, lfrazierpage@nola.com. Follow me on Twitter @LisaFrazierPage.